Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.

It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.

Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and  technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.

If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utilize SaaS CMS.

LOS ANGELES, CA – Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, today announced its plans to further improve ease of integration with third-party ECM document repositories via full CMIS compatibility in its upcoming release of Liferay Portal EE 6.1.

CMIS is an industry standard that unifies ECM and DM repositories and enables easy integration for a wide range of repository types. Liferay introduced CMIS compatibility in Liferay Portal EE 6.0 to its out-of-the-box Document Library. Full compatibility in 6.1 EE will allow users to pull in data from multiple CMIS-compatible data repositories, including vendor-specific products like SharePoint and Documentum.

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.

Boston – June 16, 2011. Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, today announced the availability of a new version of its Case Management Framework. Nuxeo CMF is an enhanced distribution of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), adding functionality to support the flow and use of diverse but related content that needs to be handled and managed in a case or container metaphor.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. - June 14, 2011 – .NET Forge CMS is a new website CMS for web developers who know and love .NET technology.  The new product includes a free Community edition and a Professional edition with e-commerce capabilities.  .NET Forge CMS is a professional platform for .NET developers with ORM tools and MVC architecture which are field-tested in large projects.

Boston, Paris and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – June 14, 2011 – Hippo, a leading vendor of commercial Java Open Source Web Content Management is proud to announce a new technical alliance with Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM Platform) company.

The two companies have built an ECM/WCM connector based on the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) standard.  A webinar with a demonstration of this connector will take place on July 20th.

Both Nuxeo and Hippo are open source, Java-based, CMIS-compliant platforms, so the partnership between the two is a natural extension – bringing high value functionality to developers, content architects and end users of both systems.   The Hippo/Nuxeo connector benefits from a high degree of flexibility and ensures that content coming from any source within the organization can be easily integrated into both platforms.   
“The Hippo CMS and Hippo Portal helps empower our customer’s audiences, by driving multi-channel, multi-lingual, multi-site solutions,” said Hippo CEO Jeroen Verberg. “The CMIS connector to Nuxeo applications adds yet another possibility for the online communication of content. And, of course a connector between these two open source, Java-based platforms is quite empowering for organizations who need a scalable system that can grow and integrate with other tools.”

In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for  Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.

Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?

Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.

Boston – Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, now offers a Digital Signature add-on for its flagship Open Source Document Management software, Nuxeo DM. Based on the X.509 standard, the new component provides a secure electronic method for signing PDF files in Nuxeo DM and verifying the signatures with a digital certificate in a PDF reader.